Nature & Animals influenced Moby Dick

Melville sailed on a whaler and the book is made out of it. He shipped aboard the Acushnet out of Fairhaven in 1841 and spent eighteen months in the Pacific fishery before jumping ship in the Marquesas. What that put in the novel is not atmosphere, it is content. Roughly a third of Moby-Dick is cetology: the anatomy of the sperm whale, the difference between its head and a right whale's, the blubber, the spermaceti, the try-works, the line, the boats. The chapters are written as natural history and several of them are. Two real events sit underneath the plot: the sinking of the Essex by a sperm whale in 1820, which Melville read Owen Chase's account of and met Chase's son at sea; and Mocha Dick, an actual white bull whale off Chile that survived repeated attacks and was written up in 1839.